In the malls, preparations had been made for five months with advertising dollars set aside for promoting sales and deep discounts to lure the shoppers who had, in effect, been boycotting the stores in September and October. Ingenious plans for opening earlier and staging "midnight madness" sales to trigger a stampede were put in place.
You have seen the commercials disguised as news stories, featuring perky local news "correspondents" stirring a buying frenzy with upbeat reports on manic consumers waiting feverishly to rush into malls the night before.
Bill Bowles writes about this on his CNI Blog:
"The problem is that many of us have been force-fed with a diet of nothing but passive, uncritical consumptionism, indeed, we are addicted to the stuff; breaking such powerful habits is what this is all about; it's about getting people to think critically again about what's going on and why and what, if anything, we can do about it."
Bowles also ties this cultural affliction, sometimes known as affluenza, back to our dependence on a media system that won't really allow other voices to be heard.
Were most media outlets connecting any dots between the annual shopathon and the "severe recession" that many economists are forecasting and the rest of us are living?
Were there any warnings to the public to save their rapidly inflating money for expected harder hard times? Was there any explanation of how prices have sharply risen and, thus, the discounts--often "teaser" rates just like the ones offered sub-prime loan victims--are really not all they are cracked up to be?
No way!
Where were the stories alerting us to this coming calamity on the front pages? They aren't there. It is not just not in their interest to carry them, but years back, MTV pointedly rejected an ad from the Cultural Jammers Network urging a "Buy Nothing Day."
It is not surprising that it was a call from Adbusters, the anti-consumption movement that helped galvanize the occupation on Wall Street that since morphed into a global movement,
Many of the shoppers this season are charging it, even though all the credit card companies have jacked up rates driving the real cost of shopping higher, and even though many people owe more than ever.
The companies are banking on them. The day after Christmas, VISA will report on how much business was done. In years past, they called it "disappointing." They will likely again this year.
That's because of the steady decline of our economy thanks to illegal practices initiated by white-collar predatory lenders backed by our biggest banks and hedge funds, as well as the inability of regulators to regulate and a complicit media to blow the whistle, which caused a multi-billion dollar economic crime that is still in progress.
In years past, the New York Times sent reporters into the stores and found "desperation rather than celebration." By Monday, in recent years, Wall Street was "glum," according to Fox News.
So much for a "Black Friday' bounce for Wall Street.
Said Manning, "Clearly, the winter holiday shopping season will need a much more enthusiastic response from higher income households if it is to prosper, given depreciating home values and rising daily living expenses."
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